THE strangest fortification line on earth is being planned for the island of Hawaii. For thirteen miles across the flanks of Mauna Loa, the world’s most active volcano, high barricades will dam and divert rivers of fire. This daring scheme is designed to protect the Hawaiian city of Hilo, with its 20,000 inhabitants, from the volcano’s flow of lava. Science, for the first time in history, has declared war on a volcano.

Will we win the crucial race to gain mastery over this most devastating of all weapons?

By Dick Halvorsen

WORLD WAR III, if it comes, may be won or lost, within 48 hours—and without a single A-bomb dropped or a single shot fired. We could win the next Big One by harnessing the mightiest physical force in the world: the hitherto uncontrollable weather.

Fanciful nonsense? Crazy day-dreaming? Science-fiction? Not a bit of it. Consider these startling facts: A hurricane expends more energy in one minute than all the electrical power produced in the United States in the past 50 years. . .

THE WORLD’S first sailplane, something new in gliding, has just been constructed by John Demenjoz of Bridgeport, Connecticut. This novel glider represents nearly a year of work. It has a 40-foot wing spread, is 30 feet in length, and altogether weighs less than 600 lbs.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just build the factory in the mountain and leave it there?

Bombproof Plane Factories ROLL INTO MOUNTAIN SIDE

Raid Shelters for Assembly Plants: A Swiss Inventor’s Solution to the Problem of Protecting Production AIRPLANE FACTORIES that literally run to shelter from raiding bombers have been invented by Antoine Gazda, noted Swiss armament designer, and erected at undisclosed places in Switzerland by the Pilatus aircraft concern as a national-defense precaution. A typical installation consists of a pair of twin assembly plants, normally standing in the open where their total of 360 workers enjoy natural sunshine and fresh air.

YOU see the Allopaths arrived first, with Hippocrates, and quickly seized all the natural strongholds,—popular ignorance and superstition, the laissez-faire instinct of the mob to be led or driven, and the panicky animal fear of pain and death. These they further fortified with traditions of medical learning and omniscience; with the alleged inability of the lay mind to grasp any ordinary physiological fact; and the pleasing fiction that every physician is a man of science, holding the only key to health.

This seems like it would be incredibly imprecise. It seems like if you wanted to cheat, you could abstain from pressing the first button and then press the second to vote. You would essentially get counted twice. Try that trick with a really powerful transmitter and you could probably throw the whole vote.

“TALK-BACK” for your RADIO

NO problem of the commercially sponsored radio broadcast is more vital than the determination of listener response. What percentage of people like a program and what per cent do not. If the president asked his radio audience to vote “yes” or “no” on an important question how valuable it would be if he could learn the trend of opinion on the topic by the next morning; and with no more trouble to the listener than the mere pushing of a button on his radio set.

TOMORROW’S train will be too fast for a timetable. Leave New York at 12 noon for the coast, and you’ll arrive in Los Angeles at the same time, the same day!

How’s that? At 1,000-mph your train will travel as fast as the sun in its apparent motion across the earth from east to west. You’ll pace the sun through every time zone from Eastern Standard to Pacific Time as your wheel-less train glides across the continent in three hours on its graphite-lubricated slippers. It’ll take the sun three hours to race the same distance, and you’ll flash into L.A. in a dead heat—at the same time you started!

HOW many moons has the earth? If your answer is one, you may be wrong! Astronomers believe that there actually are one or several small satellites orbiting with tremendous speed between the earth and the moon.

If the predictions of our astronomers are correct, and there are a number of small moons circling the earth at short distances, then space travel may become a reality many more years sooner than is anticipated. For the moonlets which our government is now searching for can be used as ready-made stations in space.

There’s a good reason the Hugo awards are given for writing Science Fiction and not Romance.

The Future: Electronic Mating

A look into the more rational marriage choice of the future, by a science expert on things-to-come.

By Hugo Gernsback

Marriage still remains man’s greatest gamble. The world’s divorce rate constantly accelerates at a dizzying rate. Clearly there is something seriously wrong with our customs and our approach to marriage—it cries out for radical reform.

People rarely speculate why so many of our most dazzling “sexy” beauties of screen and theater shed husbands like a pair of gloves, and why other famous and exquisitely beautiful women, with the most alluring anatomies, never marry at all.

“The first nation to establish a lunar military outpost will rule the earth” says Willy Ley, expert in rocket research.

THE man in the moon may plot the attack that will open World War III. For the man in the moon will be a powerful “spy in the sky” rocketed to the earth’s satellite by the aggressor nation to prepare the way for an all-out assault to conquer the world.

Soon after a 20th-century Columbus pilots his rocket to the moon, the nation that sent him there will have a lunar base that will expose any spot on earth to celestial spying and sudden rocket invasion.